There was silence. “Well!” I exclaimed.
“I thought you said he was nasty,” said Maria.
“I thought he was.”
“He looked sweet with his little girl. Not many men can look after children like that.”
“I didn’t even know he had a kid,” I said.
“She looked sick,” Maria said. “Did you see how bony her face was? Probably some sort of illness has left her an invalid.”
“Yes. Something like silent fever, I’ll guess. Poor child.”
“No wonder he is not high up in the army, then,” said Maria.
“What, you mean harboring unacceptables? That’s why he has to teach school?”
“You know what they are like about that,” said Maria. “I’m not saying it’s good, the way the government treats sick people. I think it’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
We gathered ourselves to walk on. “All right, Stirling?” I asked, turning to him. He was leaning heavily on the wall. “What’s wrong?”
“Boys!” It was Sergeant Markey’s voice. I turned to see him coming back down the steps of his house. “What are you doing loitering around here?” he demanded, in his usual manner.
“We can loiter around wherever—” I began, but at that moment Maria exclaimed, “Hey, Stirling!” I turned. Not in time to catch him as he passed out. He smacked down hard on the cobblestones. I fell to my knees beside him, and so did Maria, dropping the basket. He was out cold.
Sergeant Markey knelt down next to me. He turned Stirling over and pressed his hand to his forehead. “He has a high fever,” he said. “You need to get him home quickly. This looks as if it could be something serious.” Then Stirling came to. He stared at Sergeant Markey, whose hand was still pressed down on his head.
“You fainted,” I said.
“Oh …,” he said distantly.
I waited for the color to return to his face. “Can you sit up?” I asked. I put my arm around his shoulders and pulled him into a sitting position, Maria supporting his other side. We moved him round so that he could lean on the wall. Then I noticed that Sergeant Markey had gone. Not unlike him, I thought. Typical, in fact.
I felt Stirling’s forehead. The heat was rising off it like steam. “He can’t walk home like this,” said Maria.
“Give him a minute,” I said. “He’ll feel better in a minute.” I turned to him. “Stirling, will you be able to walk home?” He made no answer. “Stirling, can you hear me?” I passed my hand in front of his face. “Stirling?” He did not seem to mark it.
“How is he going to get home?” asked Maria.
“Well, he’s going to have to, somehow,” I said. “I can carry him if it comes to it.”
“All the way?”
“I’m not doing all this weight training in school for nothing.”
“Still, it’s—” Someone touched my shoulder, and I realized it was Sergeant Markey, holding out a glass of water.
“Here, give him this,” he said. So that was where he had gone.
Stirling drank some of the water and seemed to be listening to me when I spoke to him. “Will you be able to walk home?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled after a moment. “Yes … I think.”
“Take my carriage,” said Sergeant Markey.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“He cannot walk like that. Take the carriage. I can wait until the driver gets back.”
“I’m not sure you can get to our street by carriage,” I said, not looking at him.
“He can take you as far as possible, anyway. Where do you live?”
“Citadel Street.”
“Ah,” he said as if I had just told him, “The sewers.” Or perhaps I only imagined it. “If he took you down to the market square, could you come up to it from there?”
I couldn’t think properly. “Maybe,” I said, dabbing the water onto Stirling’s forehead with my jacket sleeve.
“I think you could,” said Sergeant Markey. “The sooner you get him back home, the better.”
He bent and picked Stirling up, then carried him briskly across to the carriage. Stirling’s bandaged hand fell limply across Sergeant Markey’s back. We hurried after them. “Get in,” said Sergeant Markey, and he laid Stirling on one of the seats.
I smiled at Stirling as we sat down, to try to reassure him. “The young lad’s been taken ill,” said Sergeant Markey to the driver on the front. “Will you take them as near to Citadel Street as you can get? I’ll pay you when you get back.”
“Yes, sir.” The man shook the reins, and the horses moved off.
I had not thought that Sergeant Markey would be paying. I did not want to be indebted to him. But it couldn’t be helped now.
“All right, Stirling?” I asked. He nodded. It looked to be a big effort. “We haven’t been in a carriage before, have we?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. He shook his head and managed a faint smile.
“We used to have our own carriage,” said Maria. “It was not much use except for going out of the city. I had my own pony as well, but that was a long time ago.” She reached across and took Stirling’s hand. “Nearly home, Stirling.”
His head was jolting against the seat. I swung over onto his side of the carriage. “Here, put your head on my knee,” I told him. Maria helped him up so that he was leaning against me. He began to shiver then. She spread her shawl over him. “I should not have made him come out,” I said. “I didn’t know he was ill.”
“You weren’t to know,” she said. “Anyway, he was better this morning.”
“I still feel guilty.” I touched his shoulder. “All right, Stirling?” He nodded.
“It’s not your fault, Leo,” Maria said. “That’s how it is with illness. You cannot plan for it.”
The streets were crowded, and the people had to stand aside to let the carriage pass. Kalitzstad was not built for carriages; we rarely saw them. We were descending toward the market square, on one of the main roads. We drove close past the church and around the edge of the square, then turned off toward the castle and Citadel Street. “The way we came was quicker,” said Maria.
“Sergeant Markey’s paying anyway,” I said. She laughed, but Stirling didn’t even smile at that. His eyes were closed, and his forehead was still hot when I passed my hand over it. I opened the window, leaned out, and called to the driver, “Can we go any faster, please?” He raised his hands helplessly. The people went on thronging past the carriage doors.
Stirling coughed feverishly. “He’s had that cough for days,” I said. “I thought it was nothing. I should have known he was getting sick.”
“A cough by itself is not serious,” she said. “And you fainted yourself the other week. It often happens.” She paused. “I think a doctor needs to see him, though.”
“What doctor?”
“Father Dunstan, then. He knows about medicine. Your grandmother should ask him to come and see Stirling.”
“Yes, I’ll guess she will. She always does when we’re sick.”
“Just in case it’s something serious. I’m sure it’s not.”
We continued in this uneasy way until the carriage slowed, halfway up Citadel Street. “Sorry, this is as far as I can go,” called the driver, and he opened the door for us. “Need a hand to get the boy out?”
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Come on, Stirling.” I lifted him over my shoulder.
“Are you sure it’s all right to do that?” Maria said anxiously. “You don’t want to do yourself an injury.”
“I’m fine,” I said. She followed me.
I carried Stirling up the street slowly, so that I would not jolt him too much. Maria went ahead to unlock the door, and held it open, and I maneuvered us through it, trying not to catch the door frame. “I’ll run ahead and tell your grandmother,” said Maria while I was still lifting Stirling up the stairs. “It will give her such a shock if you suddenly burst in like this.”
“Poor baby!” cried Grandmother wh
en I brought Stirling in. “Put him on his bed.” I carried him through the bedroom door and laid him down carefully. “What exactly happened?” she asked, feeling his pulse. “His heart is beating fast! And he has a fever! He was fine this morning.”
“He just suddenly fainted,” I said. “He was fine, and then he fainted.”
“Stirling, can you hear me?” Grandmother said.
“Yes,” he whispered, though his eyes were unfocused.
“Tell me what you feel like. Dizzy? Sick?”
“I can’t see properly. Grandmother?”
“Yes, it’s all right. You’re safe at home now.” He clutched at her, but his hand went wide of her shoulder as if he could not see where it was at all.
“Can you see this?” I asked, holding my hand before his face. He made no sign that he could.
“What?” he croaked.
“Leo, will you go and get Father Dunstan?” asked Grandmother. “Hurry. Go at once.”
I shut the front door and ran down the stairs.
Father Dunstan was kneeling at the altar. “Leonard!” he said, turning as I clattered through the door. He always called me Leonard, because he didn’t really know me. “Glad to see you well again.”
“Could you come and look at Stirling?” I said. “He is sick.”
“Certainly, yes.” He stood and picked up his cloak from where it lay over the front pew. “Now Stirling? This is sudden, is it not?”
“Yes.” He strode out of the church and I followed him. “He’s been coughing for a couple of days, and then he just fainted suddenly, and he’s been bad ever since.”
We hurried through the square and up toward our street. Father Dunstan shot the occasional question at me as we walked. He led the way, and I jogged behind him.
“Do you think it is serious?” I asked when I had told him all the symptoms.
“I cannot say,” he replied. “But sometimes illnesses appear serious at first, and then turn out to be only mild. Let us hope it is one of those.”
Maria was still there when I got back, and I was glad of her company while I waited in the living room. Father Dunstan was in the next room with Grandmother and Stirling, and I could hear their low voices but could not judge anything by the tone. I picked up Grandmother’s sewing absently, then stabbed my finger on the needle, swore and dropped it again. Maria did not notice. She was staring out the window.
“Maria?” I said after a while. “What did you say you read in the newspaper? About diseases that start with loss of feeling?” She turned to me. “You were talking about it yesterday.”
“Oh yes,” she said. But she did not go on.
The previous day’s newspaper was lying on the table, and I reached for it now. “Is it in here?” I said.
“I … I think so, yes. But it was not a very serious article. You said yourself that this newspaper …” She trailed off as I searched through the pages.
I went through it once, then again, impatiently. She took it from me and turned to a page near the back, scanning it for a minute without showing it to me. I leaned over her shoulder to read the headline: when I got back, I realized I’d been shot.
“It sounds like comedy,” I said, though I was not laughing. “Hold it still; your hand is shaking.”
She did not speak while I read it. It was a real account of a soldier who had had what he’d thought was a close escape in battle. He rode back to camp alone. When he got there, he saw that his leg was bleeding, and he realized that he had actually been shot. But he could not feel any pain.
I glanced up at Maria, but still she did not speak. “What did he have, this soldier?” I asked quietly. “What illness?”
“Silent fever,” she said.
I stared at the page. The words were drifting in front of my eyes. I tried to read on, but I couldn’t. “It’s a different strain, they think,” said Maria. “Slow-developing silent fever.”
“What does the rest say? Tell me.”
“It says they are just discovering this disease. Some of the symptoms are different, so they always thought it was a different illness. It doesn’t pass on between people like ordinary silent fever. You know how with marsh sickness you catch it from drinking bad water, not contact with people who are infected? They thought it was something like that. But then they found at the border that people were getting sick with this disease because they came into contact with silent fever carriers.”
She ran her finger down the page. I followed where she was reading: “ ‘The illness always begins with temporary periods of loss of senses—in most cases sight or hearing; but in many, taste, smell, and occasionally feeling can be lost too, as in the case previously described.’ ”
I looked at Maria. Neither of us said anything. At that moment Grandmother gave a cry from the next room. We both clattered to our feet in a rush, still staring at each other in blank horror.
At the bedroom door Maria paused for a moment, but I pushed it open and she followed me. Father Dunstan knelt beside the bed, one hand clasped in Stirling’s. Grandmother’s head was pressed against his shoulder, and she was sobbing. The only one who noticed us enter was Stirling. We stood in silence while Father Dunstan attempted to comfort Grandmother and she cried. I tried to catch the priest’s eye, to ask him in a look what was wrong, but I couldn’t, and at last I blurted out, “What is it?” Neither of them answered.
Then Stirling murmured, “Silent fever.” At the words, Grandmother’s wailing grew louder. We had known it already, but this confirmation from Stirling himself made it seem so final.
I ran to his side, but he did not seem troubled, or even quite conscious of what was happening. Grandmother’s sobs rose. Even Father Dunstan, who saw people sick like this every week, had tears in his eyes. Why was I not crying? All I felt was selfish disappointment that just when I had thought everything was perfect, this had happened.
I turned to look at Maria kneeling beside me, and a tear fell from between her eyelashes and landed on her cheek. Impulsively, I reached up and brushed it away, and I kept my hand there, pressed to the side of her face. Then I was suddenly angry with myself. Stirling was ill—seriously ill—and all I could do was flirt shamelessly. I dropped my hand, my fingernail catching on her cheek, and stood up and left the room. No one even called after me.
I met Maria down in the yard the next morning. She was there, with Anselm half asleep in her arms, when I stepped out of the bathroom. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Me? Yes.” I was still putting on my shirt. It was early, and I had thought I would meet no one.
“You look tired,” she said. “You look as if you haven’t slept.” The baby murmured, and she jogged him absently. “How is Stirling?” she asked.
“Not so bad. Better than he was yesterday, anyway.”
“Good.” I stepped away from the bathroom door to let her in. “Are you going to go to church this morning?” she asked. I nodded. “I’ll see you there, then. Give my love to Stirling.”
I was almost at the door when she said, “Leo?” I turned. “I have had silent fever,” she said. “I had it, and I got well again quite soon. It will be the same with Stirling, I think.”
“Are you telling the truth?” I said. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Halfway up the stairs I thought of something and ran back down again. “Maria!” I said. She was still at the bathroom door, struggling to quiet Anselm, who was beginning to grizzle. “How did you get well again?”
She hesitated, rocking the baby. “I just … got well.”
“Just like that?” I persisted. “Was there no medicine?”
She began arranging the baby’s little shawl carefully. “I had some medicine. Not much.”
“What was it? Tell me the name.”
She did not answer for a long time. Then she said, “Bloodflower.”
I stood still and stared at her. I knew about the Bloodflower. It was the one certain cure for silent fever. I knew about i
t, and I knew what it cost. “Where did you get that?” I said eventually.
“People used to find it in the mountains. It used to be more common than it is now. I had silent fever about eight years ago. It has got much rarer.”
“But they still find it,” I said thoughtfully. “You read about it in the newspapers sometimes.”
“People recover without it. That’s what I wanted to tell you. My father’s doctor gave it to me as a precaution, even though I was recovering already. I think Stirling will recover just the same.”
“But if we had the Bloodflower …,” I began, then stopped. I wandered back up the stairs.
I was at church alone. Grandmother would not leave Stirling. He was the only one of us who had slept the night before, and he seemed better for it, although he complained that his head hurt, and he still had a high fever. This was how Father Dunstan had said the illness would go: he would sink and then rise again. Until one day, I thought, he would sink below the surface.
When I thought that, such fear caught me that I felt as if I was falling. Really falling. The whole world stayed where it had been, but I dropped through it, into darkness, as if it just wasn’t there. I gripped the front of the pew and went on mouthing the words of the prayer. When the bells jangled at the front, they started my heart beating fast, though they always rang at the same point in the service.
I felt the panic rise again in my heart when I heard Stirling’s name listed in the prayer for the sick. Stirling North, among so many others who did not even seem real. Of course, they were real to someone. But to me they were just names—not actual people who were actually sick. And now—
I was breathing fast. I pressed my hand to my mouth and wished that I had sat nearer the back of the church, where I would not have been so exposed.
I caught Maria’s eye as she filed past me behind her mother on her way back from Communion, jogging Anselm up and down to stop him from crying. I gave her as much of a smile as I could, and she smiled faintly back. She looked tired in the cold light of the stained-glass windows. Maybe she had been worrying too.
After the service I waited behind for Father Dunstan. He emerged from the vestry, knelt for a moment at the altar, and then turned and saw me standing halfway down the church. “Leonard,” he said, approaching. “How is your brother?”
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